Dying in Darkness: Jeff Bezos Turns Out the Lights in the Washington Post's Opinion Section
On Wednesday morning, outgoing Washington Post Opinion Editor David Shipley huddled with his soon-to-be former staff. Barely an hour earlier, owner Jeff Bezos had forced Shipley out as part of an audacious plan to transform the paper's ecumenical opinion section into one that would now exclusively publish opinion pieces in favor of 'personal liberties and free markets.'
Praising Bezos' candor, Shipley said the billionaire 'certainly has a better business record than I have,' according to a participant.
Yes, Amazon is a behemoth. But this week's seismic news, cutting against decades of tradition where op-ed pages at publications like the Post at least tried to reflect the entire American spectrum, suggests those vaunted Bezos instincts seem to have gone seriously off track in the journalism business.
In personally announcing that he was dramatically re-orienting the editorial line, and in fact wouldn't even run dissenting views, Bezos added another sharp example to a narrative that represents a grave threat to the Post's image: The idea that its owner is messing around with the product in order to curry favor with his new pal Donald Trump, who has the power to withhold contracts from Amazon and other Bezos companies.
The paper's image is not some abstract question for journalism-school professors. It's a matter of dollars and cents. If readers don't trust a publication's name, no amount of Pulitzer-worthy scoops will fix it. For Bezos, a guy who believes that the Post needs to gain a broad-based audience, it's a baffling blind spot.
Which is why, when it comes to the prospects of the Post, I'd rather risk my mortgage payment on the business judgments of an opinion-journalism lifer than those of the billionaire founder of a world-changing e-commerce company.
After all, it's not some cosseted Postie whose chaotic last-ditch decision to kill an endorsement of Donald Trump's rival cost the struggling company hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers last fall. It was Bezos himself. And it's surely not some ponderous editorialist whose latest edict effectively rebrands the publication away from the interests of Washington and toward the politics of Silicon Valley — and looks likely to cost it a chunk of the remaining audience.
Owners may get the final say at publications they own, but the wisest among them have let their newsrooms and editorial boards make their own decisions without fear or favor. That's to prevent the very impression that Bezos is making — that of a mogul trying to disguise his own predilections as independent thought.
Up to last year, Bezos' failings at the Post were largely viewed as sins of omission. He bought the paper for $250 million in 2013 and poured untold millions more into strengthening its atrophied muscles. Despite that, the publication fell deep in the red once the reporting rush of the first Trump era ended. Bezos retooled, hiring a publisher who blamed the troubles on pious journalists who don't care if 'people are not reading your stuff.' Maybe he was right, but it begged the question of just who had been minding the store during the first decade of Bezos' ownership.
Yet even as leadership talked about amping up readership, the owner personally alienated real and potential readers: first by spiking the endorsement, then by showing up in the line of moguls at Trump's inauguration and now by declaring that the publication would have one editorial line for all of its contributors. It all made his publication look wimpy, or possibly corrupt.
Instead of being an occasionally fussy repository of mostly mainstream points of view, the venerable publication's opinion pages now risk looking like a vessel for a very rich owner to curry favor with the man who runs the government. It's going to be hard to keep that image from sticking to the whole organization — including the non-wimpy, non-corrupt reporting corps that keep digging up scoops on the administration.
Bezos, of all people, should know this: He's the branding whiz who came up with 'Democracy Dies in Darkness.'
Among many journalists, Wednesday's bombshell announcement is being debated as a matter of media ethics: Was Bezos within his rights as an owner to call the tune on opinion matters? Or was this type of process meddling a violation of norms that go back at least to the 1950s?
'His note is clear that the changes he is making affect Opinion, which of course is traditionally the provenance of the owner at news organizations,' executive editor Matt Murray said in a staff note. 'The independent and unbiased work of The Post's newsroom remains unchanged.'
But it's a distinction without a difference — because the general public has a hard time understanding the journalism-school distinction between opinion and news.
The really startling thing is what a rotten business decision it looks like. Rather than a brand that tried — not always successfully — to reflect a broad swathe, Bezos has intentionally chosen a narrow lane for his opinion content. It's likely that this narrower image becomes that of the whole company.
Worse, it's a pretty crowded lane, despite Bezos' assertion in his staff email that 'these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.' Between The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and The Economist, there's no shortage of outlets that are organized around a generally pro-market editorial line. For that matter, there's the Washington Post. Do you recall the publication editorializing against the free market? Me neither.
In meetings after the announcement, staffers got few details on what Bezos' announcement would mean in real life. Unlike emotional meetings that followed prior tumult at the paper, the hour-long session with Shipley was mostly an exercise in glumness, punctuated by many questions but few answers — perhaps not surprisingly, since Shipley himself will be out the door on Friday. Were opinion writers with disfavored ideologies or interests going to be sacked? The details, apparently, will have to wait until after he hires an actual editor to oversee the section.
In the meantime, people trying to figure out whether to cancel subscriptions in protest have only Bezos' vacuous staff announcement to go on. This may be the dumbest business move of all. Instead of exercising his owner's right to hire a new opinion editor — and then keeping quiet while that professional remade the section in a way that comports with Bezos' current ideological inclination — he published a note that reads like an entitled plutocrat's musings.
'There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views,' Bezos wrote. 'Today, the internet does that job.'
Does it? It seems to me that it provides a fun-house of caricatures of everyone you disagree with.
'I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,' he added. 'Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America's success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.'
Sounds good late at night in the dorm room. But does said freedom include, say, the freedom to start a union at an Amazon warehouse? Or run a business without worrying that some monopolistic e-commerce behemoth is going to drive you under? Come to think of it, these sound like great subjects for energetic debate on a pluralistic op-ed page somewhere. Too bad Bezos, instead of embracing the great American history of arguing about freedom, announced that he's not so keen on debate.
If the name of the game is growing the Post, wrapping the organization in this kind of edict seems misguided. Of course, if the name of the game is using the Post's opinion work to curry favor on behalf of the owner's other businesses, it's pretty brilliant. So long as you keep that part a secret — which chest-thumping messages like Bezos' fail to do.
WIth rumors circulating in the newsroom about upcoming restructuring at the troubled publication, it also renders the owner a less credible decision-maker when it comes to what may well be financially necessary cuts: Are we sure this is about the paper prospering, or is there another agenda?
Back in the 1980s, there was a trend in Washington of conservatives adorning their cars with a bumper sticker that read: 'I Don't Believe The Post.' I suspect those could fetch a pretty penny on the resale market today — thanks not to the people who write for the publication, but the person who owns it.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this column misspelled Matt Murray's name.
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